An administrator pushes, on a shoestring budget, to move his university and the world toward a more sustainable equilibrium.

By

I was thinking, over my second cup of coffee, just how blunt, accusatory, vehement, vituperative, vicious is the verbiage used by many climate change deniers. If you go with the theory that apparent anger is usually an expression of inner fear, a lot of people must be really threatened by the idea that human activity has consequences.

And I was thinking that such a large amount of fear must be rooted not just in a simplistic world view, but in a real need for an unarguable simplistic world view. Something that goes well beyond John Stuart Mill's observation that "conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives," to the same degree that the term "conservative" has taken on a creedal dogmatism it never had in Mill's day.

As the caffeine began to invigorate my nerve endings, I wondered how much of a net disadvantage it might be to the cause of sustainability that its advocates express themselves, on average, more fully and more moderately than its attackers do. And then, ...

And then, ...

And then, I read Mark Morford's column from the San Francisco Chronicle. And I rolled on the floor, laughing.